a few inches between their hands and didn’t touch.
Bossgond hummed, and invisible pressure against her palms snapped Marian’s hands back to her shoulders. He smiled, but kept the pressure steady.
Magical arm wrestling? Marian narrowed her eyes, sucked in a deep breath. She felt her own will, and something else—Power?—surge through her body, tingle through her hands, leave the hollow of her palms to push against his, be stopped against a barrier.
She concentrated, found a pool of energy within herself, drew it up and sent it out in a ragged stream against his Power. His hands trembled. Marian set her teeth, visualized a river of force inside her, welling up from the deep pool, turning into a torrent pouring from her hands to crash against Bossgond’s wall. His hands snapped back to his shoulders.
Looking surprised, he frowned, then pushed back at her. She kept the Power steady against the strong force of his for what seemed an eternity that drained her and started her panting—perhaps only a minute. Then she slumped back against the pillow. Bossgond’s Power followed her, taking her breath, then vanished.
“Extraordinaire,” he said.
She heard his voice around buzzing in her ears. Gentle, inexorable fingers clamped around her wrists and brought her upright again. Her lungs pumped and the dress seemed to soak up her sweat and release a floral scent. Huh. Wriggling her legs and bottom, shifting her shoulders, she stared at the man from under lowered lashes.
He was inscrutable. Like a certain little green, pointy-eared Master of the Force.
Her own personal taskmaster. Great. She knew now that she hadn’t given the green guy’s students the sympathy they had deserved.
“Next test,” Bossgond said, raising his hands, palms vertical again.
Marian didn’t think she could twitch a finger, but managed to tilt her hands up from her wrists.
“To see how well we will do as Circlet and Apprentice,” Bossgond said.
Marian suppressed a grimace. She knew the word “apprentice.” It made her feel like she was ten again—maybe younger, just starting elementary school—though, she was a beginner at magic.
She didn’t even have the basic socialization of any child brought up in this culture—what constituted rules of magic?
But Alexa seemed to have managed a position of high status, and in a relatively short a time, if Marian’s recollection of the coat Alexa had worn in the vision was right. It was last winter’s jacket, so she would have purchased it no earlier than the fall….
A sting against her palms brought her back to find her teacher frowning at her from under silver eyebrows. Her cheeks flamed. She’d let her attention wander! Oh yes, just like a kindergartner. Heat flushed her neck, too. She’d disappointed a prof—not good. She prided herself on being an exceptional student.
So she dipped her head in apology. “Excusez moi.”
Bossgond nodded solemnly. “Attencion,” he said.
She nodded again, kept her gaze fastened on his face, her mind on what would come next. Her stomach tightened. She hated pop quizzes. How could you get a perfect score without practice?
“Follow me,” Bossgond said. He moved his hands far apart, cocked his head.
Intent on him, she moved her hands apart, too. Then he began gesturing, doing odd things with his hands, arms, face.
Marian mirrored him, watching. Finally, he returned to his original position.
“Now you move and I will follow,” he said.
This was the strangest activity Marian had ever done with a teacher. Tentatively she set her hands together as if in prayer. He did the same. A little bolder, she tilted her head, grinned. He did the same. So they continued, Marian leading, until he said, “Fini.”
When her eyes met his, he said, “Now we move together, but neither of us leads.”
That sounded very strange. So she watched him and when he moved his hands a little she followed, but leaned to one side, and he did so, too. It was…balance. More than that, it was a connection, knowing how they should move together, and in her mind she began to hear a stream of musical notes weaving into a melody. A couple of minutes later, they brought their hands together, palm to palm, and a huge flare of energy burst from her, dazzling her with its lightning brightness, its orchestral chord thundering in her ears, her mind.
She spun free. Suddenly she was looking down on her body, hand-to-hand with Bossgond, in a round tower room. Then she was in the room above them, where she saw the star pentagram that had brought her. She rose above the tower to see a large island, the green coast of an unfamiliar land, then drifted even higher until she saw how the world curved.
Free.
Terrified. There was nothing to hold her here—no bond with this planet, this land. She still couldn’t feel any link to Earth or Andrew, and wherever that corridor was that she’d entered Lladrana from, it didn’t seem to be a physical place she could find.
Marian floated, unable to control her magic that had pushed her from her body. The Power was so strong she was unable to move her spirit-self even a smidgeon.
A slight breeze could blow her away.
6
Bossgond’s strong hands squeezed hers. “Come back!” His resonant voice trembled through her wavery self and she plummeted into her body. She clung to his hands, stared at his homely face with her physical eyes. Her body trembled.
“You have returned,” Bossgond said. “Good.” He separated his fingers from hers one by one and stood up stiffly. “I will get you hareco—a drink to help you settle.”
Leaning back on the huge, firm pillow that braced her, Marian hoped it wasn’t some pitiful herbal tea. Good black tea would be nice, or—
She smelled it. Coffee! And she murmured a prayer of thanks. Bossgond handed her a mug and she inhaled the fragrance. Hot, dark coffee. She drank greedily, while he sipped from a matching mug. The pottery had a big yellow bird emblazoned on it, but she was too shaken to ask about the icon.
“Your first lesson will be in grounding.” He frowned, and the small black streak in his golden hair seemed to darken, or perhaps the rest glowed.
Marian pressed her lips together. She understood what he said well enough, and she wasn’t that much of a kindergartner that she didn’t know what “grounding” was—making sure you were solid in your body before doing magic.
Keeping her voice even, she set aside her mug and said, “This will be hard. I do not have a link—” she hooked her two index fingers together “—to Amee. My link to Exotique Terre is broken.” Her chin wobbled at the thought. She grabbed her mug and sipped again—something she could understand, coffee.
Bossgond patted her shoulder awkwardly and took his place again. “From my observations, it seems as if Exotique Terre has little magic,” Bossgond said, as she drained the last, lovely gulp from her mug.
Exotique Terre was what he’d called the globe of Earth the night before. Marian didn’t know what to say, so she shrugged.
“A Power like yours would not have been so stifled, so bound until it struggled to get free, here on Amee.” The old man’s tone was laced with disapproval of her previous world. “You are far beyond the age of the standard Apprentice.” He snorted. “But perhaps it is good that you are an adult. I have little patience.”
He’d been fine with her so far, but she sensed she was a novelty to him.
The meaning of his words sank in. “From your observations? You can see into my world?”
“Indeed,” he said, and waved to something that looked like an enormous set of binoculars on a stand, aimed at a series of mirrors that reflected infinitely. She couldn’t